


better on my own

by ecv-197 (lazyfish)



Series: i'm a liability [1]
Category: The Orville (TV)
Genre: F/F, Getting Together, Sedoretu
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-13
Updated: 2019-10-13
Packaged: 2020-12-14 03:16:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21008825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lazyfish/pseuds/ecv-197
Summary: Talla's never told anyone the way families work back in her neck of the woods on Xeleya - mostly because no one's ever asked.





	better on my own

**Author's Note:**

> This series is going to be the story of a [sedoretu](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Sedoretu) forming between Talla, Kelly, Ed, and Gordon. Most of the lore of a sedoretu is explained in this first fic but feel free to check out the link as well!

It took three months for anyone to notice Talla’s necklace. Truthfully, there had been better things to do than comment on jewelry, but it was still strange to be sitting in the mess hall and have Kelly say, without warning, “It’s a nice necklace.”

Talla’s fingers went to the single bead without thinking. Most of the time it was tucked under the collar of her uniform, hence why no one had seen it before, but she had been fiddling with it earlier, too, and had apparently forgotten to put it away. “Thank you,” she said, rolling the bead between her thumb and forefinger contemplatively. “It was my mother’s.”

“You know, you haven’t said much about your family. Or Xeleya at all, really,” Kelly said, propping her chin on her hand. It was a leading statement and wasn’t trying to pretend to be anything else. Talla paused, considering, but she had already decided to indulge Kelly the moment the necklace was brought up at all.

“It’s one of those weird cultural things. Xeleyans do family a lot differently than… well, everyone.”

“Alara’s family seemed normal.”

Talla fought the urge to roll her eyes. “From what you’ve told me, Alara’s family is more traditional than I’d ever want to be.” And besides that, she didn’t really like thinking about Alara; it made her feel like a replacement, and it wasn’t a good feeling. Most of the crew was good about not making the comparisons obvious, but Talla still felt the weight of being second-best on her shoulders.

Kelly nodded. She obviously didn’t think much of the Kitan family, either, if the slight curl of her lip was anything to go by.

“I had four parents,” Talla explained. “Two mothers and two fathers. Two Morning, two Evening.”

It was the last part that made Kelly’s eyebrow’s shoot up, but she didn’t ask a question. That was already better than most people did.

“On Xeleya, most people have what’s called a moiety - either Morning or Evening. You get it at birth, inherited from your mother, and generally people don’t change it. The traditional sect think moieties drive us away from being able to fulfill our highest intellectual potential because we’re so worried about squaring up, but we see it as a way to balance ourselves.” Talla finally stopped fiddling with the bead, tucking it away again, where it belonged. There were few people she had enough patience to go through the whole explanation of life on Xeleya, especially since most of the crew seemed to forget a planet could have multiple cultures, and Alara’s experience wasn’t Talla’s. 

“So you had one parent of each? Morning man, Morning woman, Evening man, Evening woman?” Kelly asked, reaching the right conclusion.

“Yeah.” Talla sucked her lips in for just a moment. “I’m Evening.”

Kelly laughed, bright and warm. It wasn’t a teasing laugh, though - just an acknowledgement of her own shortcomings. “I have no idea what that means.”

“It means whatever you want it to,” Talla said with a shrug. There were old wives tales about the differences between Morning and Evening, and one particularly macabre nursery rhyme, but none of it had much truth. Or at least, no more truth than most of those tales.

“I think it means you should tell me more about your family sometime,” Kelly answered, voice lilting upward in what might’ve been curiosity. Her comm beeped, then Ed’s voice came through requesting her presence on the bridge.

“Sometime,” Talla agreed as Kelly walked away.

\---

Sometime came sooner than Talla thought, before she had even processed their first conversation in full. She didn’t like how hesitant she was being about this - hesitation wasn’t her style - but after seeing how backwards the Moclan culture had seemed to everyone onboard, she didn’t want to take any chances. It wasn’t like her culture was oppressive or discriminatory (at least she didn’t think so), but it was different, and sometimes that was enough for people to balk at.

But not for Kelly, who was sitting on Talla’s couch with a glass of wine cradled in her hands and a mind eager to learn.

“Tell me more about your family.” It was a request with just a hint of a command - but everything Kelly said seemed authoritative, confident, altogether certain. 

“My family, or moieties?” Talla asked, unsure which was Kelly’s real question.

“Either, both. We don’t have a lot of information on Xeleya.”

Talla bristled, and Kelly seemed to realize her misstep. “I’m not going to write a report on you. We’ll save that for Isaac.” Talla could tell the words still sat bitter in Kelly’s mouth, even if Isaac didn’t have anyone to report to anymore.

“You can’t have sex with someone in your same moiety,” Talla blurted out. She groaned internally. Of all the places to start, it had to be there? True, she was looking at Kelly’s hands and her impossibly long, impossibly nimble fingers, but she just  _ had _ to say that?

“Okay…” Kelly said slowly. “So how do you know someone’s moiety to know whether or not you’re allowed to have sex with them?”

Talla shrugged. “You just… sense it, I guess?” With Xeleyans, it was obvious. Talla could walk into a room full of people and know without a doubt who was Morning and who was Evening - it just  _ was _ .

“So which one am I?”

“Humans don’t have one. So you could be either.” Talla’s mouth was dry, and she took a sip of wine in a vain effort to rehydrate herself. “As long as you stick with what you pick. Otherwise it gets… gross.”

“Morning,” Kelly said. “I want to be Morning.”

Of course there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for that decision that had nothing to do with the information Talla had just given her. Kelly was just a morning person, or something. (Maybe she had realized her hair was beautiful when the sun was shining on it, and didn’t want to attach herself to night.)

“So Ed is Evening,” Talla said. That made sense, too. Ed was cool and calm and quiet, as certain as the stars. 

“I’m confused on one thing, though. If you’re not supposed to have sex with your same moiety, how do you have a four-way marriage?”

“It’s like best friends, but with marriage-level commitment.” Talla licked her lips, trying to think of a better way to explain something that was already so natural to her. “You know how some people get all their safety and security from their partner?” Kelly nodded. “It’s designed so it doesn’t have to be that way in sedoretus. You have someone to confide in other than the people you’re sleeping with.”

“Sedoretus?”

“Four-way marriages on Xeleya,” Talla clarified. 

“Do you want one?”

For some reason the question was a punch in the gut. Talla had to stop herself from gripping the wine glass so tightly it shattered, choosing instead to set it on the table so she could rest her hands on her knees.

“Yeah, I do.”

“Must be hard, outside Xeleya.” Even on Xeleya, the complicated nature of a sedoretu made it difficult to find a full one - but Kelly probably guessed that herself. Human’s two-person marriages often failed, as Kelly and Ed’s had, so it would make sense sedoretus would fail just as often.

“It is. But that’s what the beads are for,” Talla said. “Anyone who knows about sedoretu knows what the necklace means.”

“Care to enlighten me?”

Talla reached under her uniform shirt - the jacket had long since been abandoned on some chair in her quarters - to pull out the necklace again. 

“Midnight blue bead means I’m an Evening woman. If I had partners, their beads would be on it, too. Leather cord is for dating, silver cord is for marriage, black is for mourning.” It was a simple system, but a good one. It saved a lot of awkward small talk trying to figure out whether or not someone was available, and more than once Talla thought humans should try something similar. 

Of course, that would make things difficult for people like Kelly and Ed, who wouldn’t admit they were just waiting for things to work out right to be with each other. They weren’t dating, but they weren’t open to anyone else either.

“Handy system,” Kelly said before taking another sip of wine.

“I think so, too.”

Kelly paused. “But you said the necklace was your mother’s?”

“The cord is hers,” Talla said. Her mother hadn’t needed the leather cord any more when she had switched hers out for silver, then black. “And the bead was synthesized.” It was a copy of her mother’s bead, every divet and scratch rendered by a synthesizer calibrated for those sorts of precise replications.

Kelly seemed to accept that information with as little fanfare as she had accepted everything else Talla had said. It wasn’t like her to be so quiet about something, but Talla was afraid to push and find out the silence was Kelly’s only possible polite response.

“So, do you think Claire and Isaac will ever get back together?”

The change of subject was abrupt, but Talla was glad for it. Better an abrupt change of subject than disappointment.

\---

“Can I ask you a question?”

Talla looked up from her tablet screen. She hadn’t heard Kelly come into the room, and she didn’t particularly like the look the other woman was giving her.

“Sure.” Talla put the tablet down and tried not to ignore the uncomfortable twist in her stomach. “Shoot.”

“Are you ignoring me flirting with you on purpose, or are you just oblivious?”

Talla opened her mouth, then closed it.

Opened it again - closed it again.

“Oblivious, then,” Kelly said, nodding to herself. “Awesome,” she added in a tone that said it was decidedly  _ not _ awesome.

“Can you just -  _ what _ ?” Talla was confused. Very confused. It had been obvious to her practically from the first day that Kelly was still in love with her ex-husband, and humans generally weren’t as open-minded to polyamory as Xeleyans were. Kelly had been nice to her, sure, but it was just that - being nice. The same way she was probably nice to every new crew member she had to interact with on a daily basis.

“You didn’t think it was weird that  _ immediately _ after you mentioning the whole sex thing I declared myself to be the moiety that would let me have sex with you?”

Talla flushed. “I mean - yes, but…” She didn’t have an ending to that sentence.

“But?” Kelly repeated.

“Ed?” Talla asked weakly.

“I mean, in theory, he could still work in this situation,” Kelly said. “But even if he couldn’t… I like you, Talla.” She looked like she was going to say something more, but didn’t.

Talla had to admit she had thought about the relationship between Kelly and Ed, too, when she allowed her mind to wander and consider what a relationship with Kelly would be like. She wouldn’t mind having Ed as her brother-husband. She trusted the captain, even if they weren’t particularly close; he was a good man. And if allowing Ed to be a part of the picture would help her get Kelly… yeah, Talla would take that in a heartbeat.

“I like you, too.”

The corners of Kelly’s lips tilted up into a smile. “So, what are we going to do about it?”

What were they going to do about it, indeed. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I know the sedoretu lore can be a bit confusing, especially at first go-round, so feel free to leave any questions in the comments below. :)


End file.
